Valuing Long-Term Intercultural Partnerships

This article describes the process of implementing an international partner questionnaire by a music therapy charity with 30 years of experience in intercultural skills-sharing project work. The questionnaire was developed as part of the charity’s practice evaluation, as a way to listen to the voices of skills-sharing project participants across seven countries, who have maintained long-term partnerships with the charity. In this article, we present specific learnings from partner responses to identify six sustainability outcomes evidencing the lasting impact of music therapy skills-sharing for participants and those in their care. We also present the charity’s theory of change, developed in response to the analysis of questionnaire responses. This article provides insight into how to implement a large-scale international questionnaire as part of service evaluation, and insights from listening to partners’ voices about the effectiveness of music therapy skills-sharing in their communities.